rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

“Lube up, minorities!”

that should be the slogan of Tulia, Tx. we stopped there while we were cutting through the panhandle. a nowhere town. was hoping there would be some sort of “lawman of the year” plaque or statue, but there wasn’t. oh well.

insert:http://www.drugpolicy.org/law/police/tulia/index.cfm

we left Roswell this morning after checking out the UFO museum. I’m not sure how I feel about that place… but I’ll go with:
something crashed in Roswell in 1947. the government covered it up because it was top secret, or experimental, or some shit like that.
it wasn’t fucking aliens.

THE END

otherwise, the day was pretty slow. listened to conservative talk radio and Tom Petty. fuck. yeah.
you know, now that I think about it, it’s no wonder that the backcountry votes straight retard every election year. I mean, seek through AM when you’re 50 miles outside of Amarillo. or Sioux City. or Pierre. or Indianapolis for that matter. this is what you get.
Dr. Laura. Limbaugh. O’Reilly. Medved. the fucking Savage Nation. a church service (and it doesn’t even have to be sunday!)
come on! Soros should give up on this MoveOn.org bullshit, and just start buying up airspace in the sticks. broadcast Air America. make the farmers listen to Al Franken, Chuck D, and Randi Rhodes (god, she’s a bitch.)
we could fight morons with morons. think of it!
tonight, we’re in some dive off of I44. I hope Tulsa is prettier in the daylight.

so I’m grocery shopping with Galia Sunday. neither of us have bought food in months – I was chewing on shoe leather near the end. horrible.
we both go to buy eggs. Galia eats a lot of eggs. she gets her egg on. I eat me some eggs too, so we both buy a separate carton. she goes for the organically grown ones. the ones without all the hormones and shit in them, and the eggs are harvested from chickens on a free range farm in a beautiful green mountain valley in Vermont. the carton is made of recycled cardboard and newspaper. Galia buys these for two reasons. one: she can afford them, and two: she likes to eat her eggs guilt free.
my eggs, on the other hand, are like animal suffering and hatred for the environment packaged in a tiny white shell. I buy them because they’re cheap, and I hate animals.
I like my eggs with guilt. (ha!)
she sees the discrepancy in our egg tastes, and she jokes, “I care about animals, unlike some people I know, Matt.”
I sigh and roll my eyes. I say, “Jesus. you’re like some sort of hippie yuppie hybrid.”
she says, “oh. That’s a ‘bobo.’”

What in the hell is a “bobo?”

“Bohemian Bourgeois. Bo Bo.”

well I’ll be god damned. a new word to describe a subculture I disdain!
see, I hate hippies, cause hippies (as I understand them) are all talk. they’re all about changing the world for the better, all about peace, but have no feasible plan to bring that into place. They know what the Ruckus Society is. They make big, garish, unwieldly puppets to bring to protests on the Mall, and wonder why the moderate stripe looks at them and then votes conservative. They may or may not have, at one time or another, considered themselves “pacifist anarchists.” they yell “end the occupation of the west wing” in the middle of Howard Zinn lectures, when I’m trying to listen to fucking Howard Zinn. I really hate god damned hippies.
I hate yuppies, cause, well, they’re yuppies. they are the personification of personal gratification in an already “me first” society. my first recollection of what a yuppie was when my brother was taking me to a baseball card shop on Rt. 1, and we had to go down by Gunston Hall (this is back in Va). he pointed at some guy tooling around in front of us on a BMW motorcycle, and said “see that, Matt? that’s a yuppie.”
and they like Huey Lewis. that guy sucks. to hell with yuppies.

so, a hippie yuppie, or, “Bohemian Bourgeois,” that must be my ultimate enemy.

David Brooks coined the phrase. the same guy from the NY Times op/ed page, and the guy who tagteamed it with Mark Shields on the Newshour during the election. well, who woulda thought??

here’s an interview with him with Gwen Ifill from back in 2000. he wrote a book about bobos. So he’s like the bobo-master. Like Jane Goodall, or the woman Sigourney Weaver played in “Gorillas in the Mist.” heads up:

DAVID BROOKS: I think in general they’re a force for good. Places like Wayne were pretty boring when I went to high school there. Now they’ve got all these interesting stores, great bookstores, you know. You can get your all-natural hair coloring, and your, you know, vegetarian dog biscuits, so that’s interesting. The other thing, the bohemian mindset has gone into corporations, which was the center of the bourgeoisie, and transformed them. So now, you know, in their advertising slogans, you know, Burger King uses the phrase, “you’ve got to break the rules.” Lucent Technology says, “born to be wild.”
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/jan-june00/brooks_5-9.html

ho ho.
cree.
pee.

So Brooks is down with bobos, it seems. I disagree. I find something appalling at spending hundreds to dress as if you spent nothing at all. or joining a corporation that you consider as “cool” as you. or donating money to “hip” cause like the freedom of Tibet (sorry, I’m all about Tibetan freedom, but it was just begging for a name drop), and still stepping over the homeless guy on your city street who wants money for a burger off the value menu.
something about the way urban chic is now turning towards aping the lower classes as a means to flaunt their wealth, I don’t know… maybe I’m more pissed at “bobo-fashion” rather than bobos themselves.

you know how animals have natural enemies in their environments? Nile crocodiles and wildebeests? Josh and hair care products? squirrels and decency?
well maybe, just maybe, I’m the antithesis of the bobo. and I must resist it wherever I roam.
or maybe, I’m more of a bobo than I care to admit, and Ashley will point that out in a comment, noting that my favorite bar in town is the Video Saloon, and I regularly update a blog. that shit seems kind of bobo. or maybe just bohemian. I don’t know.
both ideas are equally plausible.

ps- I don’t think Galia is a bobo. it’s okay; me and Galia roll deep.

to quote:

Republican leaders knew from the outset they were entering new and possibly rocky terrain (concerning the Terry Schiavo case). DeLay said that he told Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) two weeks ago, “We have to do something for Terri Schiavo,” but that the chairman was reluctant because, as DeLay recounted, “we don’t have a precedent for doing private bills in these matters, and he didn’t want to violate that precedent.”

The majority leader’s response to Sensenbrenner: “Be creative.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1944-2005Mar25.html

some people are going to be all like, “but Matt, I have to sign up to read the Washington Post online!”
and to them, I’m all like, “you should be registered to read probably the best goddamned paper in the nation anyway, you stupid asshole. so go tivo “CSI: Miami,” and join the thinking world.”

St. Patrick’s day today.

2day’s muzak: Sabbath, Beck, the Stooges

anyways, Mike got a speeding ticket.
it throws people off, I think. out west, speed limits go up 10 mph. so interstates are 75 and state highways are 65.
Mike drives fast. and my car ain’t in tip top shape, so I don’t like to really test its limits. I generally feel its probably healthier for the engine to keep it under 80. that, and I’m constantly afraid it’s going to blow a gasket, slip a gear, something like that. Smith says I’m paranoid, makes fun of me about it. but he can fuck off; we aren’t driving his piece of shit across the country.
okay, I digress. so Smith’s general rule o’ thumb is that whatever the speed limit is, you can tack on 15 mph and be okay. and I suppose that generally works. however, the Arizona Highway Patrol seems to be under a different impression.
100 dollars. 86 in a 75, or some shit like that. Mike was pissed, obviously.

other than that, today was simply driving. not much to it. I think the coolest thing we saw today was the National Observatory Satellite Range, which we drove through at like 4 pm. it’s up in the mountains about 90 miles inside the New Mexico border, absolutely miles from anywhere. you come down into this mountain valley, and you can see them from pretty far off. I mean, shit, they’re hooked up to telescopes, so they’re pretty goddamned big and there’s a lot of them.
tonight, we’re in Roswell. checking out some bullshit alien crash site museum tomorrow, it’s what this town is built on. see, it’s like Valparaiso = popcorn and Roswell = alien landing site (only Valpo probably wouldn’t implode without the popcorn festival; with no little green men, Roswell might.)
then, we’re rolling on the Texas handle, and I’m making a detour just to get a breath of fresh air in Tulia. smell that, America? smell that balanced justice system at work? smells… like. Tulia, Texas. fuck yeah.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. go ‘eers.

to-day’s quote (its a long time in the car, folks, your mind starts to wander):
“‘Operation Dumbo Drop’ had an all-star cast.”

now you know.

you have been warned.
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Studio/8290/bendover.html


so I’m copy editing at the IDS right now, and there’s nothing to read. so I’ve been dicking around, reading about the history of skateboarding videos (bored youth can make a lot of money from being bored) and the guys who made those bumfights videos (those are some scumbag motherfuckers. the “bum hunter.” christ).
eventually, I ended up reading the trivia page on IMDB about Randall “Tex” Cobb. besides playing thugs and apes in B movies, he got his ass beat by Larry Holmes back in the 80′s.
he was a professional boxer! who knew?
and that there link up there, that’s a link to a webpage in his honor! it’s obviously a farce, but the smart ass who runs it put up the fan mail he got from the true believers. so, to diminuatively add to their shame:

From: “David L. Sedore”
It is a great pleasure to find another individual who has such a great appreciation for the talents of Mr. Cobb (and probably a distaste for “oriental martial bullshit”). I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your web site, to let you know that I have bookmarked it, and that I look forward to visiting it as it develops.

From: Jon Hurwitz and Josh Heald
Josh and I met tex tonight at a movie screening. He was just chilling outside the theater so Josh asked him, “Hey, weren’t you the bounty hunter in Raising Arizona?” “That was one of the most misunderstood characters in movie history . . . Tex Cobb, good to meet you,” he replied. He introduced us to all his friends and we chatted about movies and boxing for guys a ferw minutes. He is genuine in all resepects and was one of the nicests people we have ever talked to. What a pleasure it was to meet such a beautiful man.

god. “Raising Arizona” ruled.

2day’s muzak: Sam and Dave, the Beatles, Tom Petty

I spent all day wandering around the strip with Mar’s camera. I’m not exactly sure what I was going for in the pictures, but I’ll try to make sense of them after they’re developed.
anyway. I took a stroll down Las Vegas Blvd. stopped at the Frontier where I played some nickel slots with a bunch of old ladies – they all had a much better grasp on the game than I did. they were “working the slots” to get more cash. god. that sounds dirty.

kept walking. went into the Circus Circus, tried to get some pictures of their wedding chapel. it was closed. I was pissed, I really wanted to get in there. I can’t imagine anything more horrifying than being married in the Circus Circus. that shit’ll add to your eventual divorce, I’m sure.
so I kept on, dived deeper into the casino. tried to get into the “Adventuredome,” the resident theme park. but that was closed, too. fuck!
but it was all okay. because I bumped into Alec Toombs, my upstairs neighbor. no shit. he and his buddy were drunk, having a moment. so we shared our surprise, and I moved on. told him I’d see him when I got back. small world, no?

we hit up the Paris Buffet around 8:30, then Smith and I went down to the old strip – I wanted to get more pictures of shit like Binion’s Horseshoe and the Golden Nugget.
I think I got some killer photos, but the verdict’s still out on how well I can handle a camera with more than just one button.
while were down there, we happened upon a “free” strip club. now, just a disclaimer on how I approach titty bars, and this is probably quite telling of my person – I approach them in the same way that I would approach drugs. I’d never go out of my way for them, or buy them. but if they happen to be right in front of me, then hey. why not?
so. we go to get in, and the doorman tells us there’s a two drink minimum. I’m all like, “okay. this place is probably more fun with some liquor in you anyway.”
the drinks start at 8.50 apiece.
the fuck???

so we didn’t go in. (note: I’ve since been told that this is standard practice with strip clubs. who knew?) oh well.

so today, took us forever to get out of Vegas. we went to In n Out Burger on the other side of the the interstate, cause Jim was hollerin’ for it. not bad, I’ll say. beats the shit out of McDonald’s. I mean, they put 1,000 Island on the burgers! hot damn!
then Mike and I rolled out. I slapped a bumper sticker on the car that I bought at the Circus Circus the night before. it reads: “my, those boobs look heavy. may I hold them for you?” and it’s got a pair of groping hands.
hell yeah. classy.

we hit up the Hoover Dam, then kept rolling – eh, fuck it. I’ll write this later, I’m exhausted.

most importantly: I SAW THE GRAND CANYON TODAY. AND IT IS STUNNING, GOD BLESS.

tonight, I sleep at the Frontier Motel. the beds are hard, and Smith’s nose whistles while he sleeps. not quite snoring, though.

the athletic department didn’t fire Mike Davis. that’s right, motherfuckers. he lives on.

http://www.idsnews.com/subsite/story.php?id=28479

oh, and fuck Bobby Knight. get over yourself, you crotchety old asshole. remember those same bunch of kids you couldn’t do dick with in 2000 at IU? well, Mike Davis took them to the fucking Final Four.

I officially don’t like him. no matter how good a coach he is. I hope WVU gets brutal on him this weekend, and he gets so mad he has a heart attack.

Media Matters for America is an entertaining website. David Horowitz doesn’t like it. nor does Rush Limbaugh. or Bill O’Reilly.
but that’s okay. I like it – it’s fun to record talking heads’ words verbatim to show how full of shit they are!

Bill O’Reilly on the March 15 edition of Westwood One’s The Radio Factor:

O’REILLY: You know, the Founding Fathers didn’t write anything into the Constitution about gay marriage. Because back then, if you were gay, they hung you.
So — you couldn’t get married ’cause they put you in the rack. You know, if you were runnin’ around wearing a chartreuse hat, you were in lots of trouble. So, we didn’t even have to worry about these people gettin’ married because if they come out of their closet in the log cabin — somebody’ll shoot them in the head. So, there really wasn’t an issue back in the Founding Fathers.

see how good you have it, faggots? stop complaining.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200503170003

muzak 4 2day: Harry Belafonte, Johnny Cash. White Stripes.

I woke up at 9 am eastern. Actually slept better in the car than in the Econolodge back in Kansas (econolodge – what a name). I didn’t sleep steadily, but I think that was due to the fact that I was a little jumpy. never slept in a car before, in a parking lot, in the cold, in a strange state. very foreign circumstances. cut me some slack.
so I brushed my teeth standing on a curb in front of a supermarket, pulled on all of yesterday’s clothing, and called the state highway authority to make sure 550 to Farmington was passable. they said it was.
it was snowing so fucking hard halfway there that I had to stop and snap the ice off my antenna before it broke the whole thing off. good fucking christ.
made it out, though. after the snow died down, I could finally see the mountains – something I had missed out on due to the inclimate weather the day before.
drove through Shiprock around noon. there are some poor ass Indians in this country, I’ll tell you what. think “rural slum.”
got gas in Teec Nos Pos, just inside the Arizona line. its kind of like the first town inside the Navajo Nation – which is roughly the entire northeast quadrant of the state. the teenage girl who worked the counter had these deep cuts all over her arms.
I could think of three things they could have come from: 1) herself (she’s a “cutter”), 2) an accident, or 3) (and I apologize for the speculation, I’m just a dumb cracker) it was religious, ceremonial. whatever. they looked like they hurt.

I did a loop up in to Utah (I was officially in Utah, too! how many states is it, bitches!?) so I could come down US 163 through Monument Valley.

Monument Valley made the entire trip worth it. words can’t describe how beautiful it really is.

I kept on through Page, where I got a really awesome view of Lake Powell at this overlook. could see for miles. some rabid german Green Day fans, however, pulled in behind me about ten minutes after I had been up there and ruined the serenity. heh. they were ridiculous.
from Page went back into Utah to pick up Route 9. 9 runs through Zion Nat. Park, and it’s basically the only way to get to Vegas without making a sick huge detour, halfway up the state. normally, it costs 20$ to drive through, but the park was kind of “closed” for the day; by the time I got there at like 6:30.
dusk. no toll. ding!
the park clears out when it gets dark, it seems, cause you can’t see much in the dark. but I could see enough.
I saw enough. once again, words can’t describe. the hills can make you feel small, no doubt.
I finished the day with an 80 mph jaunt down the interstate into Las Vegas. the city just appears when you come over the mountains in the north. at night, seems like you can see it’s glow a good twenty miles beforehand. that’s Las Vegas for you, I suppose: it gets real garish, real quick.
I parked at the Barbary Coast, and met Mike and Jim for dinner. coaxed Dan to leave the room for the first time in days (he’s down the street playing 1-5 stud at the Mirage right now) and lost ten dollars on 25 cent video poker. fuck that game.

right now, I’m in the Bellagio. I’d imagine, obviously without basis or warrant (most of my musings are like this) but this casino, which I’m told is at the top of the game, must be one of the shining end results of capitalism. others could be things like the NYSE, teenage girls with their own plastic on shopping frenzies. you know, just absurd sums of money spent on pleasure, people who can’t afford to throwing their money away on games of chance – the corporations that own these bordellos getting richer.
outside the Bellagio, when I was coming in, I saw this dirty hobo. one arm. in a wheelchair. panhandling with his baseball hat. just outside the Bellagio with its Armani, Dior, Jimmy Choo. its Versace, its “Picasso Restaurant” overlooking Lake Bellagio, marble floors and the multimillion dollar ceiling decoration in the hotel lobby, there’s this filthy bearded guy who smells like piss, who can’t really form words too quickly and wants whatever change you’re not going to dump on a 4-8 game in the makeshift poker room that’s always filled with people who’ve been watching reruns of Tilt on ESPN. he’s probably going to spend it on booze. or the cheap all you can eat buffets at one of the “shitty” casinos down the street.
so if the casinos are the successful results of capitalism, that would make the one armed homeless guy in the wheelchair its failure.

“10.50 for a Miller Lite. and I didn’t even see any ass.”

“the SouthWest on the cheap”

I’m sitting at a Denny’s. I’ll give this much to chains; they thrive on their uniformity. in the case of this fine establishment, that means I’ll wait 40 minutes for my food. I’ve already waited ten for them to notice me and take my order. no matter. the waitress will get a good tip. I’m in a good mood.

I left the ol’ Econolodge at 10 am. way to get a jump on the day, I know. but anyways, I got clipping. Kansas was more or less how I expected it to be in the daylight. farmland, flat. like northern Indiana (RESPECT, onelove).
I stayed on I70 til about 15 miles past Salina, where I took 156 south.
yeah, I was on that road for long fucking time.
I got gas and film in Great Bend. one of those towns that somehow has near 30 thousand people, but still manages to be hours from anywhere. I was in line behind a woman wearing army sweatpants (the kind you get in boot camp, or if you fill out one of those recruitment cards with the prepaid postage) and a T shirt from Cancun that had Beavis going through the “one tequila, two tequila” motions. bleach blonde hair. couple of kids in the dirty Grand Am out at the pump. buying beef jerky and camel lites along with the reg. unleaded.
aah, middle America. I could never leave you.

kept going. rocked out hard to some QUEEN. pulled over in a field, got some pictures of the electric windmills outside of Kinsley. a picture of the grain elevator in Larned. Front Street in Dodge City. the general desolation of the Oklahoma panhandle. took a piss in the bushes at a “rest stop,” so quiet out there I could have danced around with my pants around my ankles, and still had my privacy.

the first town inside the NM line is Clayton. it’s about the size of Kouts (that’s small), I’d imagine. what’s interesting, though, is the fact that it’s a much more bold and dark spot on the map than Kouts is. it’s comparatively a Valparaiso – which is a lot fucking bigger than Clayton, New Mexico.
anyway. I was a shade under a quarter tank when I roared through Clayton. I figured I would stop somewhere in town, but just wasn’t feeling the first gas station I passed. turns out, that was the only gas station – but I didn’t feel like circling back a few blocks to fill up.
that was a mistake. the next town of any size was Springer, 85 miles ahead on the interstate. and I wasn’t sure if a “shade under a quarter tank” would get me there.
but fuck it! never fear! I’d stop in Gladstone or Abbott, two towns on 56 halfway to Springer. niggas can’t touch me, I thought.
Gladstone was two houses with a diesel pump for farm equipment in front of one,, and I’m pretty sure Abbott wasn’t inhabited. just a mailing address, a crossroads. it started to snow.
fuck.
running out of gas at the corner of 10th and Jordan with your two friends in the car with you is one thing; out in God’s country, alone, in a blizzard, is an entirely different thing altogether.
I was beginning to think how awesome it was that Galia hooked me up with those gloves I thought I wouldn’t need. at least my digits wouldn’t freeze off.
but, I got lucky. I made it to Springer (sorry, I know – all that build up and no money shot. just like bad porno).
the fucking snow was so bad, however, that I decided to head south on I25 rather than north. see, there’s not direct route across northern NM, and it’s all mountains. so right now, I’m doing a dogleg to get around the weather. I pulled over early, cause I’m still running on eastern time. that’s fine. I’ll be up and rolling out early tomorrow, because…
I’m sleeping in my car in the Denny’s lot. I priced a couple of motels. between 55 and 45 for singles. fuck, I’m not made of money! I have a sleeping bag and a hammer to fight off hobos. what more do I need?
tomorrow, I’m making for Monument Valley. maybe Shiprock.
fuck it, at least I have the car to sleep in.

muzak @ Denny’s: “Georgia On My Mind” – Ray Charles. “Devil w/ a Blue Dress” – Little Richard. “Pretty Ballerina” – Left Banke